Update: My Wife’s Challenge

20Apr

The challenge that my wife laid down has more or less come to an end. The challenge is not exactly over so much and no longer quite as possible for me as it would have been had the circumstances not changed.

Right now we sit with Lexington 44 (me) vs. Fynralyl 62 (wife).

I am losing, and she loves it.

I Blame Allstate
The first change that we were not counting on was a check back from our insurance company for some random reason that I never bothered to look up, but the check was for $26 and some odd cents.

We had no clue this check was coming, so it was not in the budget anywhere. When we get money that is not budgeted, and is not a sizable amount, we go ahead and chuck it into the Fun Money section and spend it on whatever we want to have fun instead of going towards other things that in all honesty it probably should have gone into anyway. But…oh well.

So, this little check came in the mail and my wife got this funny little idea in her head that that $26 just happened to cover the fee of transferring a character. That in and of itself was not really any problem, but what was a problem was that my wife happens to make a fortune with her Jewelcrafting profession on what used to be our main server.

The steps that followed then were to get all the items, gold, mats, and whatever else that we wanted to, stock them up on a single player, and then transfer them over to our new server to give the goods to our new characters. The good thing was, we got enough gold transfered over to the new server that we could both afford Dual Specs. The bad thing was, we could both afford dual specs. And in all fairness, the gold did come primarily from her so I have no right to complain here, I’m just sharing the point.

I Blame Blizzard’s 3.1
The new patch came with one little hitch that really sunk the nails into my coffin on trying to catch up to her leveling: Dual Specialization. My wife’s desire to switch over to healing when she hit the Outlands was the one chance I was going to have to really catch up to her since she has more play time than I do.

With the dual spec now available though, she’s able to jump over to Holy for running instances, and then back over to Prot for when she is solo questing. We both knew that this option was going to become available with the patch, but we also knew that we would be hard pressed to get the gold together to do it with.

Well, if you read the section above about Allstate, then you know my hopes of keeping her from this until I had enough time to catch up with her were wiped away the day the character was transferred over.

I Blame Myself
Alright, I have to admit it, it’s all my fault (but everything’s the husband’s fault in marriage anyway, right?). The first “mistake” I made in issuing this challenge was letting her in on the greatness of the Prot Pally. If I had never told her about it and shown her what kind of power my paladin had, perhaps she would have just stuck to being Holy and been left in my dust by now (not likely, but I can pretend).

Secondly, I agreed to let her do the character transfer knowing that while it would help my character, it would probably screw me on the challenge. The challenge is not a big deal, and I don’t think we have really talked about it at all since it was issued. But, letting that transfer happen allowed dual specs to happen which took away the one thing that would have held her back. I could have put the money from that insurance check into our regular budget instead of the Fun Money, but we need to have a little fun sometimes too. I don’t regret it, I just recognize it as shooting myself in the foot as far as the challenge went.